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[bryant]

The talk on the Dean campaign wasn't all that interesting -- Keri Carpenter talked about how the Dean campaign was shaped by the people, and Tom Limoncelli talked about how it was a great experience and touched on the technology some. Nothing deep. Keri Carpenter did say, at the end, that clearly great netroots wasn't enough but she didn't really volunteer any ideas on what would have helped.

Tom Limoncelli said he thought Dean lost because he was anointed the front-runner early and everyone teamed up to bring him down. That latter seems kind of self-defeating to me, since netroots takes some time to build. You wouldn't want to use a strategy that puts you ahead early if being the front-runner leads to failure.

Me, I think Dean just failed to bring together the strong netroots with a strong traditional game. Give him someone who's good at ground politics, and maybe he wins. A lot of people are talking about Kerry in 2008, and I think Kerry will likely run, but Dean's just as likely to take a shot at it if he wants to be President. And he won't be the guy who gets blamed for anything bad happening between now and then.

Technical tidbits: the Dean campaign was very Tivo-heavy, with one Tivo per major network. They used them for transcription a lot. It didn't sound like they had a database of video clips, which seems to me like an obvious area for technology. If Curt Schilling can digitize every pitch he throws into a database, I bet a campaign can do the same -- it'd make it easier to get attack and defense footage out there. But maybe the speakers just weren't aware of it.

They got, at peak, over 70K emails per day. Limoncelli mentioned RT3, and I was really interested in finding out how well RT handled that volume, but it turned out that they were planning on rolling out RT the week after Iowa. Ooops.

Comments

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

IMO, Dean failed because he didn't know how to handle the media. That let them define him as 'angry wacko'. If he'd had enough media-savvy on the campaign to get the media to portray him as justly outraged, he would have done better.

[bryant]

Yeah, definitely part of it. I'd say that's an aspect of his general inexperience as a national campaigner, just like his problems with the ground game. (Not a slam of Dean -- this is hard stuff to get right.) I think if he does run again he's going to be very hard to beat.

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

As long as the rest of the Dems don't slam him as 'unelectable' because he's not a clone of the Republican candidate.

(Yeah, I'm a bit bitter.)